Boosting Grant Applications from Faculty at MSIs - Mentor-Mentee Pairs

Melissa Thomasson is Associate Dean for Faculty Excellence & Professor of Economics at Miami University. She studies the economic history of health insurance and health care. Her current research projects include studying how changes in physician education affected health outcomes and physician labor markets.

Rahi Abouk is an Associate Professor of economics and the Director of the Cannabis Research Institute at William Paterson University of New Jersey. His research is in health economics and health policy. In his current research project, he investigates the effect of supply shocks in American physicians in the early nineteenth century on health disparities between Whites and African Americans.

Patrick Kline is a Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a fellow of the Econometric Society and the Society of Labor Economists. His research focuses on the determinants of labor market inequality and the effectiveness of public policies designed to combat inequality.

Abdelaziz Lawani is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agribusiness Management and Education at Tennessee State University. His research interests lie in experimental economics, applied machine learning in economics, and entrepreneurship. His current projects investigate access to agricultural extension for minority farmers, predictive health outcomes using social media data and machine learning, and the exploration of racial and gender biases in patenting among doctorate recipients.

Pascual Restrepo is an Associate Professor at Boston University. His research focuses on the impact of technology on inequality, labor markets, and growth.

Luísa Nazareno is an Assistant Professor in the L Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research interests include labor markets, inequality, and technology. Her current work focuses on the implications of artificial intelligence technologies for workers and the consequences of platform (gig) work in middle-income countries.

Emilia Simeonova is a Professor of Economics at the Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business. Her research interests are in the areas of Health Economics and the Economics of Children and the Family. Emilia's recent work focuses on the intergenerational effects of income transfers and the determinants of health inequalities across time and space.

Xinyan Shi is a Professor of Economics and the chair in the Department of Economics, Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Analytics at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Her research interests include game theory, financial literacy, experimental economics and public economics. She is passionate about applying her expertise in improving lives of Native Americans in the community and has been collaborating with Native American communities on projects related to COVID-19 and financial literacy.

Thomas R. Palfrey is the Flintridge Foundation Professor of Economics and Political Science Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Palfrey carries out research in political economy, game theory, mechanism design, the theory of voting and elections, legislative behavior, campaign finance, public goods provision, behavioral economics, and laboratory experimental studies of strategic behavior in economics and politics.

Jean-Baptiste Tondji is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His research interests span microeconomic theory, political economy, and organizational economics. He is particularly interested in designing and implementing decision-making protocols that induce stable, inclusive, sustainable, and efficient outcomes for better societies. Some of his past and current projects focus on markets, politics, organizations, and environmental issues.

Rebecca Diamond is The Class of 1988 Professor of Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business, a Senior Research Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her current research studies the causes and consequences of affordable housing policies, geographic segregation of households, and their impacts on economic inequality.

Leslie West is an Assistant Professor of Accounting at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. Her research interests are in the areas of accounting sustainability, financial economics, and real estate finance. She is particularly interested in studying the relationship between sustainability and affordability in the real estate market, financial performance sustainability, and housing economics and public policy.

Theresa Kuchler is an Associate Professor of Finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Her research interests are in the areas of household, behavioral, and real estate finance, and social networks, often involving large micro datasets. Her recent research leverages online data to analyze why consumers hold expensive credit card balances, often over substantial time horizons.

Sourik Banerjee is Assistant Professor of Economics at California State University Stanislaus. His research interests are in the areas of financial economics, behavioral economics, and experimental economics. He is particularly interested in studying the determinants of financial market behavior of retail investors, and designing and testing interventions that might positively influence the behavior of historically underrepresented groups in the financial market.

Jeremy C. Stein is the Moise Y. Safra Professor of Economics at Harvard University and serves on the board of directors of the Harvard Management Company. Professor Stein’s research has covered topics including behavioral finance and market efficiency, corporate investment and financing decisions, risk management, capital allocation inside firms, banking, financial regulation, and monetary policy.

Isaac Marcelin is Finance Professor and Associate Dean of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. His research highlights the relationship between financial and political institutions, public policy, natural disasters, and the economics of climate change.

Stefania Albanesi is a Professor of Economics at the Miami Herbert School of Business at the University of Miami. Professor Albanesi’s research topics have included the political economy of inflation, the optimal taxation of capital and labor income, and the evolution of gender disparities in labor market outcomes. Her recent work has studied the distribution of debt and defaults in the lead-up to and during the 2007–09 financial crisis, and the determinants and consequences of personal bankruptcy.

Miesha Williams is Vice Chair and Associate Professor in the Economics Department at Spelman College. Her research focuses on disparate economic outcomes across races in the United States, as well as on macroeconomic policies in Africa. One of her current research projects studies racial disparities in cognitive decline.

Tatyana Deryugina is an Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Deryugina’s research interests lie broadly in environmental, public, and behavioral economics. In recent work, she has studied the fiscal consequences of natural disasters and the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on female relative to male academics.

Xi Yang is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of North Texas. Her research interests lie in labor economics and urban economics, with a focus on urban and housing policies and their impacts on labor market outcomes, gender and racial inequality, fertility and marriage, and household financial well-being.

Anna Aizer is the Maurice R. Greenberg Professor of Economics at Brown University. She is a Research Associate at NBER and Co-Director of the NBER's program on Children, as well as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Human Resources. She is a labor and health economist with interests in the area of child health and well-being. Her current work considers the mechanisms behind the intergenerational transmission of poverty. In particular, she focuses on the roles played by health insurance and access to medical care, domestic violence, exposure to environmental toxins, the role of stress, and poor children's greater interaction with the juvenile justice system.

Rebecca Sen Choudhury is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Spelman College. She is an applied microeconomist. Her primary research interest lies in the area of health economics, specifically economics of risky health behaviors -- addiction, obesity and mental health.

Matthew E. Kahn is the Provost Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California and a Research Associate at NBER. His research focuses on urban and environmental and energy economics topics.

Abdullah Khan is an associate professor of economics at the School of Business of Claflin University. His research interests include urban and regional economics, development economics and public economics. He is particularly interested in studying the determinants and interlinkage of employment agglomeration, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and innovation networks.

Dr. Kalena Cortes is the Verlin and Howard Kruse ’52 Founders Professor in the Department of Public Service and Administration at Texas A&M University’s Bush School. She is the inaugural Director of the Bush School’s Program in Education Policy. Most recently, she was named Texas A&M’s 2020 Presidential Impact Fellow and 2021 Chancellor Enhancing Development and Generating Excellence in Scholarship (EDGES) Fellow. Dr. Cortes' interest is in the economics of education. Her research focuses on issues of equity and access, in particular, identifying educational policies that help disadvantaged students at the PK-12 and postsecondary levels.

Oluwagbemiga (‘Gbenga) Ojumu, is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Prairie View A&M University, Prairie View, Texas. He is an Applied Economist and his research interests include International Trade Policies, Global Entrepreneurship, and Applied Microeconomics.

Kala Krishna is an Indian - American economist, currently Liberal Arts Research Professor of Economics at The Pennsylvania State University. She is an NBER Research Associate and a CESifo Research Network Fellow. Her research is in the areas of International Trade, the Economics of Education, Development Economics and Industrial Organization.

Belinda Román is Associate Professor of Economics for St. Mary’s University. She is director of the Mexican American Studies (MAS) Certificate Program, Collaborative for the Economic Analysis of Borders (CfEAB), and Co-Organizer of the Texas Latino Policy Symposium (TXLPS). Dr. Román is the first woman to serve as president of the San Antonio Business and Economics Society (SABES), an affiliate of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE). Her research interests include the economics of cross-border economies, and the impact of local and cross-border economic development policies on race, gender, and ethnicity. Her methodological approach is interdisciplinary and includes network analysis and agent-based modelling of micro behaviors and aggregate outcomes.

Isaiah Andrews is the George Fisher Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a fellow of the Econometric Society, and a co-editor at the American Economic Review. He specializes in econometrics, and his research focuses on developing methods for inference that are robust to common problems in empirical work, including insufficiently informative data (weak identification) and model misspecification. He received a MacArthur fellowship in 2020 and the John Bates Clark Medal in 2021.

Eduardo Zambrano is Professor of Economics and Academic Director, MS in Quantitative Economics, Department of Economics, at Cal Poly. His research centers on microeconomic theory, with particular emphasis on welfare economics and the measurement of multidimensional inequality and well-being.